Teofila Silberring

This is my picture taken in the ghetto in Cracow for the ?Arbeitskarte? [German for work card]. It was probably taken in 1942.

We still had our things when we went into the Podgorze ghetto, and there they allocated one room to three to four families, divided by wardrobes. I slept behind one wardrobe, along with Father and my brother, another family slept behind another wardrobe, and well, that's how we lived. In the ghetto Father worked in the hospital. I don't know what he did there - he had had nothing to do with medicine, of course, but they took him, because he was wise. He went to work in the mornings. I stayed at home; my brother worked too. He used to go somewhere with Father; I don't even remember where.

Later on Father managed to have some papers done that made me two years older. He bought these high-heeled clogs to make me taller, and I worked. It was a carbide factory, a Jewish factory, in fact, that had been taken over by the Germans, opposite the ghetto, on 2 Lwowska Street; we used to go past the wire and it was out on the Aryan side. And there I worked with the father of Polanski Romek, that's how I know him. We worked on three shifts. So sometimes I would come home and Father wasn't there; we would miss each other. And when I had a night-shift I would sleep during the day.

Later, when the ghetto was liquidated, they ordered us to gather on the square, where the pharmacy was, now a museum. You were allowed to take with you as much as you could carry. So poor Father, he dressed me up like an onion, literally [in layers], because how much could I carry?! And I had a rucksack with books, this satchel, and the rest in a little case. Father had a case as well. There were trucks standing on Zgody Square and the Germans very politely told us to write our names on our suitcases and load them onto the trucks. They said that we would get everything in Plaszow. That was perfidious; it was meant so that we wouldn't shout, so that we would be good. Rubbish, they never brought any of it. Later it turned out that we were naked and barefoot there in Plaszow. We went on foot from Zgody Square; they took us along Wielicka Street to the camp, to Plaszow. Children went separately, men separately, women separately. They put me with the children?